Telco 2.0 and the Connected Life
BusinessWeek had it right, Cisco CEO John Chambers said today, about its feature article last week on the service provider industry. The Telecommunications industry was indeed very much recovering - and in some cases, thriving, after near-death experiences earlier this decade. The reasons as to why are quite extensive, but in many ways, the resurgence is due to a rethinking of the industry itself.
As John highlighted, providers are no longer defined by their access technology and no longer looking at only traditional services. Instead, they are looking at a much wider swath of the market, which they can now address with their new IP-based next generation networks. What they deliver is becoming not a one-size-fits-all service, but rather they are offering much more integrated or blended services. The battle for the customer will be determined not just by price, but much more by the value that providers offer customers. It’s also a signal that customers are very much leading the way for the industry.
At NXTcomm: Hear various comments on the Connected Life
Duration: 1 min. 36 sec.
Businesses are looking to consumers to find new ways to use technology and consumers are dramatically changing their expectations. Passive consumers who just watch what providers broadcast are now a minority; rather, consumers want to participate in the experience and even take a role of producing it (e.g., user-generated content). As a result, providers who now have much more capabilities in their network and the flexibility to offer new, more, and better services are moving away from the one-to-many broadcast model. With web 2.0, they are enabling many-to-many communications and seemingly unlimited possibilities for collaboration and entertainment. By giving customers more power, the value of providers’ networks will be highlighted even further since many of the experiences, whether it be HDTV at home or TelePresence at work, won’t work without a robust, resilient and adaptable network. And it’s the providers that use this network in innovative ways to transform their business that will win.
We are at the start of the next phase of the Telecommunications industry or, in contemporary parlance, the dawn of Telco 2.0 and the transition of service providers to experience providers. This industry may have been near-death years ago, but today it’s only just beginning to be re-born.
Posted by Jeff Spagnola at 03:42PM PST
: News@Cisco Notes Jul 20, 2007
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